Mike and Kenny are a couple of regular guys who get drawn into the gang world around them. They steal bags of money, pocket drugs, work as bodyguards for big-time dealers. Mike and Kenny are NYPD cops.
“The Seven Five,” a riveting documentary about Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct, takes place in 5 square miles of hell on Earth in the 1980s.
Michael Dowd, at first a decent cop making $600 a week, began pocketing bricks of money he found in dealers’ houses, then went on the payroll of a local cocaine emperor for $8,000 a week. Using tactics learned at the police academy to rob rival dealers, he’d call out, “What the f - - k you doing with my money?” Kenny, his partner, joined his life of crime in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood. “Forget about Beverly Hills and all that other stuff,” says another cop. “The ghetto is one of the richest neighborhoods there is.”
It’s that priceless dialogue, the bitter ironies, the magnificently skeevy cast of characters and even the overall structure that make “The Seven Five” “Goodfellas” in blue. Director Tiller Russell, a disciple of Martin Scorsese right down to the freeze-frames and the Rolling Stones music, lands knockout interviews with the principals, from Mike (a double for Henry Hill) to Kenny’s wife (who sounds much like Karen Hill as she sheepishly admits, “Money . . . always feels good”) to Adam Diaz, the Bryan Adams-loving kingpin who sells kilos of coke in the back of a working grocery store. Diaz says of a guy who crossed him, “He’s not around anymore. I’m not saying I killed him. He’s not around anymore.” Smile.
Russell’s film is hair-raising, hilarious, dizzying stuff, building up to a nutty kidnapping-murder plot that Mike planned around a fake flower delivery, only to see on TV news that some other thug used the gag first. “The flower thing can be used a few times,” he argued. “Not every flower delivery is a f - - king armed-robbery-murder!” “The Seven Five” is cruelly funny, roguishly charming, as cool and crazed and tough as the big bad city itself.